1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to the inverse quantization of data during audio decoding.
2. Related Art
A persistent issue in digital media is the balance between quality of a presentation, and the costs inherent in preserving quality. Many media standards specify that implementations of that standard must meet certain minimum quality requirements, without specifically limiting how the standard is to be implemented.
For example, both the MP3 and AAC audio formats specify the use of nonlinear inverse quantization during the decoding process, and the standard requires that errors introduced during this inverse quantization process fall within certain minimums. Two prevailing approaches have been adopted for these specific standards. In one approach, errors are minimized, but at the cost of substantial memory requirements for implementing the solution. In another approach, a degree of error is acceptable, which lowers the memory requirements significantly, but at an increased cost in hardware resources.